Social Justice: Creating a Just Society

Catholic Charities

Catholic Charities USA (CCUSA) is a national organization dedicated to helping people in need. Addressing both local and national issues, CCUSA supports 164 member agencies through sharing of knowledge and networking services, as well as advocacy, media services and other activities on a national level to bring about solutions to structural issues that affect ordinary people negatively.

Core areas of service include: disaster relief, shelter for those in need, direct food assistance, support programs for healthy living, educational programs, help to establish financial security, help for immigrants, adoption services, care for the most vulnerable. Each of these core areas includes a wide range of programs and services.

Local member agencies tailor their programs to meet the most serious needs in their geographic region. These programs are featured regularly on the agency's website. This month's feature, for example, is a tatoo removal program in the Diocese of Monterey, CA.

Farm Workers' Altar

Colorado artist Emanuel Martínez created Farm Workers’ Altar to celebrate an important event in the Chicano movement. On March 10, 1968, in the fields near Delano, California, labor organizer César Chávez broke a twenty-five-day fast at a Mass celebrated at this altar. Chávez endured his fast to protest unfair employment practices and substandard living conditions of migrant workers. By ending his hunger strike at a Christian celebration of Mass, Chávez honored the long commitment of religious leaders to social justice.

Work and Human Dignity

When does getting a job and going to work become a question of “joining the lemmings going over the cliff?” The critical question, it seems, regards the value and importance of work. Work in and of itself is neutral. Work becomes something negative when it reduces or threatens the human dignity of the person who engages in it.

St. Francis of Assisi, in his Canticle of the Sun, reminds us that all of creation also praises our God. We are stewards, not owners of this gift.

Pointing the way

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, commissioned by Pope St. John Paul II in 2004, reviews the importance of justice and peace in the Hebrew Scriptures and their fulfillment in Christ. It becomes clear in this document that Justice and peace are signs that the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus preached has become a reality.

Words of a Prophet

Pope Francis at the United Nations

"The simplest and best measure and indicator of the implementation of the new Agenda for development will be effective, practical and immediate access, on the part of all, to essential material and spiritual goods: housing, dignified and properly remunerated employment, adequate food and drinking water; religious freedom and, more generally, spiritual freedom and education. These pillars of integral human development have a common foundation, which is the right to life and, more generally, what we could call the right to existence of human nature itself." Address to the United Nations General Assembly, September 25, 2015

St. Ignatius' Teachings on Creation and Care of Creation

At first glance, the environment does not seem to play a huge role in the writings of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). But Dr. Susan Mahan looked more deeply and shares her findings here.

Our Mission

To promote awareness
of the active presence of God
in everyday life.

Support Theologika Digest

I must not be the dry, bloodless reproduction of a model, however perfect. God desires us to follow the examples of the saints by absorbing the vital sap of their virtues and turning it into our own life-blood, adapting it to our own individual capacities and particular circumstances.

Angelo Roncalli, Pope St. John XXXIIIJournal of a Soul, 1903

You say grace before meals? All right, but, I say grace before the play and the opera and grace before the concert and the pantomime, and grace before I open a book and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing, and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

G. K. Chesterton

Everything is grace, everything is the direct effect of our Father's love. Everything is grace because -- everything is God's gift. Whatever be the character of life or its unexpected events -- to the heart that loves, all is well.

Thérèse of Lisieux

The Catholic writer . . . will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.

Flannery O'Connor

Our call to service is not a call to submissiveness. It is a call to thunderous faith, born of deep passion that compels us to offer our entire selves for the sake of the world.

Nick Wagner,Give Us This Day, July 2012

"I won't take no for an answer," God began to say to me when He opened His arms each night wanting us to dance.

St. Catherine of Siena

Subscribe to our mailing list

* indicates required

Email Address *

First Name

Last Name

Email from Theologika.net

Theologika sends notices to our subscribers when a new issue of the Digest has been published, however, we do not send emails advertising sales or products or containing links to outside sites. If in doubt about any email you receive, please contact us.

Please Support our Advertisers

Heartfelt congratulations, and thank you for this wonderful service to the Christian Community! It is clear that a great deal of thought, inspiration and work have gone into the endeavor. I greatly look forward to keeping with it, and am grateful for your keeping me posted.

Help Support Theologika Digest

Theologika.net is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

Your purchases of resources through our links to Amazon products help support this ministry. Thank you.